Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Over the last few days, speculation has been mounting about Ed Miliband’s trade union reforms. Selected leaking of recommendations being drafted by former general secretary Ray Collins seemed to indicate radical change was on the table. Miliband was said to be pushing a proposal to abolish the electoral college for leadership elections, and drive forward existing plans to affiliate trade union members directly to the party, rather than through the unions themselves.

But Paul Kenny, the boss of my old union the GMB, has just been on the Today programme, and he’s explained what’s really happening. Ed Miliband isn’t loosening the unions control of his party by doing away with the so-called “union block vote”. He’s actually strengthening it, by doing away with his MPs' “block vote”.

Paul was on for the best part of five minutes, but his most significant contribution came about three and a half minutes in. Asked by Sarah Montague about the new affiliation plans he responded, “We’ve suggested it will take a period of time, and we’ve suggested from a trade union perspective it will take at least five years. Now, we’ll have to see what Ray Collins says but if you want to change a system like this, with all the possible ramifications on finance and organisation, it will take time.”

At the moment Labour’s leadership electoral works in the following way. MPs get a third of the votes cast for leader, members get another third, and unions and affiliates get the final third. Miliband and his team have been spinning they are going to do away with all that, and have the leader elected by a system whereby each Labour member gets a single vote for leader. The definition of “member” is also supposed to include these “new” trade unionists who are signed up directly to the party.

But as Kenny has just explained, the shift from the current union affiliation system to the “new” union affiliation system is being kicked into the long grass. Not just the long grass, but the middle of an especially remote and inhospitable section of Amazonian rainforest.

So when the MPs' voting rights are removed, an electoral college currently made up of MPs, members and trade unionists is effectively going to be replaced by an electoral college of members and trade unionists. The unions had a third of the votes for leader. Now they’re basically going to have half. More, probably, because in the last leadership election approximately 100,000 Labour members voted, compared to 200,000 traded unionists and affiliates. Quite a lot of those will have been the same people casting different ballots in different sections of the college. But trade unionists will still control the majority of votes for leader.

And if the new affiliation rules aren’t in place, that means the individual trade union leaders effectively control those votes. Paul Kenny and his colleagues are right to say they don’t technically wield a “block vote” any more – trade union members do indeed vote individually in their own electoral college section.

But as we saw in the last Labour leadership election, in practice the unions retain huge influence over how their members cast their ballots. All the major unions officially endorsed Ed. They gave his campaign access to their membership lists, but denied them to his rivals. They sent out literature directly endorsing his candidature. And one union even sent out the ballot papers with a recommendation they be filled in Ed’s favour.

What Ed Miliband is now proposing will actually embed that sort of politics even deeper into the Labour party. And to be fair, he’s doing it in an incredibly audacious way. Nearly half of Ed’s MPs voted for his brother David in the first ballot of the Labour leadership contest, while only a third backed him. So he’s just going to take their votes away. At the same time he’s going to strengthen the hand of the trade union bosses who won him the leadership.

Doing away with machine politics? Please. This is machine politics Gordon Brown would have been proud of.